Today you attend a lecture about the history of fires.
Until the 19th century Tokyo - Edo - was made mostly of wood and paper.
paper windows, paper sliding doors, paper paneling for walls.
But there is nothing so good for starting a fire as paper, and the city was famous for burning down on a regular basis
the stray embers multiplied. The saying went: Fires and fistfights are the flowers of Edo.
At the first lick of smoke, the city-dwellers would fold up floors, beds, walls flee for safer ground.
ashes settled, they would return, rent another paper box, put their home back together inside it. Their furnishings did not so much fill the space as create it.
Japan loves its flowers, its paper, all things ephemeral that fold and unfold, that bloom for a week and wither. living in a paper box, nothing more to home than what you can carry. We are all tenants of the lives we inhabit. What is it that makes us belong there?
When Westerners feel at home, we buy big, heavy things-hoping that these will keep us in our lives, hold us down.
it has not made you a home, or brought you any closer to one. You want a home, and you want not to need one.